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Griffin comes through on South Elgin's promise

South Elgin football coach Pat Pistorio made a promise to running back Shawn Griffin two years ago.

Best promise he ever kept.

Because spread offenses like South Elgin's don't require two running backs, the Storm found themselves in a personnel pickle heading into the 2014 campaign, Griffin's junior season.

The then-second-year coach had two talented ball carriers returning in senior power back Kyle Ware and Griffin, the latter a track sprinter who as a sophomore had rushed for 753 yards on 102 varsity carries. There wasn't room in the backfield for both.

Thus, Pistorio approached Griffin about playing slot receiver for a season. That way he could get Griffin the ball by running him into the backfield on jet sweeps or by throwing it to him on bubble screens and quick screens.

"I thought that would be an ideal situation to get them both on the field," said Pistorio, who promised Griffin he would get his turn as the featured back in 2015. "Shawn never complained. He accepted the role."

"You've got to do what you've got to do to win," Griffin said this week.

The move worked out well for all involved, in retrospect.

Ware led the team with 103 carries for 713 yards and 7 touchdowns and he caught 10 passes out of the backfield for 117 yards and a touchdown, a total of 830 yards and 8 scores.

Meanwhile, Griffin carried 77 times for 577 yards and 9 touchdowns, and he caught 31 passes for 268 yards and 3 more scores for a team that won 5 games. Though Griffin's 845 total yards from scrimmage and 12 touchdowns landed him on the all-Upstate Eight Valley team as an H-back, he looked forward to the day he would become South Elgin's featured back.

That opportunity came this fall, as promised.

"I felt obligated to get him back to the backfield," Pistorio said. "With the receivers we had we wanted to make sure Shawn still got 20 carries a game. That was our goal."

"I waited a long time having to play slot and watch someone else play my position so I was looking forward to it," Griffin said.

The 5-foot-8, 180-pound senior responded with the best season to date by a running back in South Elgin's 10-year history. Griffin carried 206 times for 1,631 rushing yards and a single-season school record of 21 rushing touchdowns. He also made 14 catches out of the backfield for an additional 96 yards and another score.

He was named offensive player of the year by the coaches of the Upstate Eight Valley, a division the Storm won for the first time with a 5-0 record. Last week he was named to the Class 8A all-state team by the Illinois High School Football Coaches Association.

For his efforts in helping South Elgin win a record 9 games and tie its deepest playoff incursion with a second-round appearance, Shawn Griffin, the 18-year-old son of Horace and Treva Griffin of Bartlett, has been named Honorary Co-Captain of the 2015 Daily Herald Fox Valley All-Area Football team. He is the first football player from South Elgin to win the award, which he shares with Batavia senior quarterback Kyle Niemiec.

"I'm proud of what we accomplished," Griffin said of a season that ended with a 34-28 playoff loss at Brother Rice. "But deep down inside I have this feeling that if maybe we did one or two things differently, we could have even played last weekend (in DeKalb)."

Though the job of featured back was promised to Griffin as a senior, he prepared like he was fighting for a job. He continued to work on improving his speed last spring during track season under the watchful eye of coaches like Cambron Culpepper.

He also dedicated himself to the weight room like never before. Griffin took to lifting with his linemen and they soon pushed each other to new levels of untapped strength.

It all happened under the close scrutiny of Pistorio, who guided Griffin through lifting regimens targeted at the quadriceps, hamstrings and calves. "We worked mostly on lower body muscles," Griffin said. "Squatting was the big thing. He made sure we got a good workout in, not just do a couple of lifts and go home."

Griffin improved his speed to the perimeter and his added strength allowed him to break the arm tackles and ankle tackles that brought him down in the past.

It was clear from Week 1 he was more explosive than ever, demonstrated by a 60-yard touchdown run against St. Charles East. He finished that game with 172 yards on 18 carries and he caught a 16-yard touchdown pass.

Griffin's best game of the season came in Week 6. With the Storm seeking to become playoff eligible with a fifth win, he made it happen by rushing 25 times for a career-best 253 yards. His record day included touchdown runs of 71, 4, 34 and 41 yards.

Throughout the season Pistorio mostly called outside zone plays for Griffin that allowed the patient back to wait for a crease to develop and explode into it, but against Glenbard East he installed a sprint draw, which Griffin ran to perfection.

"You're not going to run sprint draw ... well, you really shouldn't run it more than two or three times a game, but we ran that play probably 8 to 10 times," Pistorio said. "Just Shawn's ability to cut back and find a crease, which is unique with that play, made it work. We really had limited success with it but all the sudden it popped open for us and that's all due to him and his vision and his explosion through the hole. He had some big-time runs in that game."

Though the Storm offense was loaded with weapons like quarterback Jake AmRhein and talented third-year varsity receivers Andrew Kamienski and Derek Kumerow, the attack wouldn't have worked without a strong running game. In past years when South Elgin had trouble running the ball, opponents would drop eight players into coverage and dare the quarterback to throw into traffic, usually without luck.

"Any successful football team in this area has to be able to run the football, in my opinion, to go deep in the playoffs," Pistorio said. "Unfortunately, we didn't go deep, but we got as deep as we've ever been at this point, just because of our commitment to our run game. We had to run the ball to keep defenses guessing and that was not possible without Shawn. We had nobody in our program who could have fulfilled what we needed in our run game besides him."

As he suggested all season long when asked about his success, Griffin pointed to his strong offensive line of Mike Ribando, Matt Zimmerman, Brian Medina, Jeremy Jenkins and Ian Happel and the other who rotated in.

"They did a tremendous job," Griffin said. "I'm really proud of them. Coming into the year things weren't looking too good, but they really got it together and were able to get the running game going along with the passing game. That helped us utilize our entire playbook and win games."

As for his football future, the student with a 3.0 grade-point average is still in the process of finding his college home, which will need to fit him academically as well as athletically. Griffin intends to become a dentist or, perhaps, a doctor.

His future college football program will gain a record breaker. He leaves South Elgin as the program's career leader in attempts (385) rushing yards (2,961) and rushing touchdowns (31).

He also led his team in capitalizing on a promise kept.

"I guaranteed him that he was going to get every carry possible this year," Pistorio said. "I'm pretty proud of the fact that we were able to live up to that promise."

Images: Daily Herald All-Area Football Team Captains

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